I like the idea that you can build one date dimension in SSAS 2005 that
connects to all the date keys in the DW. In MSAS 2000, I created views off
of the same date table for each date key.

However, while most of my dates on the fact tables span a 10 year range,
some span a longer range, i.e., first date customer did business with us,
contract end dates way in the future, etc. A single role-playing date table
would require a 30 year span to cover all of my possible date ranges. This
creates havoc in Reporting Services which has to list all of the levels in
the date hierarchy all at once in the parameters.

I am assuming I will have to create several views of the date dimension but
not one for each date key as I did in 2000. Named queries will not work if
you need to use the Business Intelligence Wizard to set up additional
functionality in a date dimension. It requires a real table or view to plug
in a calculated field.

My question is, if you use one date dim for all of your dates, can you then
go into one of the cloned hierarchies and alter the time span? I don't see a
property to do this, but the Business Intelligence Wizard did alter one of my
cloned date hierarchies. It added attributes to my single date dim - but
only applied them to one of the cloned date hierarchies. I was wondering if
I could do something similar with the date span so I could stick with one
real date table in the DSV instead of multiple views.

No, but perhaps you could use dimension security on the cube dimension to
allow only the dates you care about... Although Admins would still see it
all

HTH,
Akshai
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"bhorwatt" <bhorwatt (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote